Many people who have websites, blogs included, are obsessive about their stats. Always wondering about questions like:
- Which pages are more popular than others?
- Where are visitors to my site coming from?
- How did they find my site?
- How many subscribers do I have to my RSS feed?
It is this last one that has been bothering me at MPOW for a little while now. If you ask this question, the most obvious answer, especially if you run your own blog, is to use a service like FeedBurner.
But what do you do if you can’t use service like this? The blog server I manage at my MPOW will potentially host many blogs. I can’t create accounts at FeedBurner for earch one. It would be too administratively burdensome.
Fortunately kind people like Ken Varnum from RSS4Lib have been thinking about this same question and have done more than think, they’ve done something about it. Ken has built the YourStats tool. You can read more about it on the RSS4Lib blog.
What’s wonderul about the tool is that you can upload your webserver log file, and the tool will work its magic and estimate the number of subscribers you have to your RSS feed.
For those of us, such as me, who can’t transfer logfiles out of our organisations Ken will kindly share the source code of the tool.
Now I’ve got one more statistic in my bag of tricks to help show how popular our blog is.
